Ashley Greathouse

Dr. Ashley A. Greathouse researches a broad range of cultural and musical topics, from eighteenth-century Britain to the present-day metaverse. Her 2024 PhD dissertation—“Urbane Promenades and Party-Jangling Swains: Music and Social Performativity in London’s Pleasure Gardens, 1660–1859”—critically examines the intersections of music, class, and gender in Britain’s most significant urban outdoor venues during the long eighteenth century, highlighting shifts in class- and gender-based power in British society while also exposing the prevalence of patriotic whitewashing in pleasure garden art and music that masked the leisure economy’s imperialist underpinnings. Greathouse’s publications include book and album reviews in Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press) and Nineteenth-Century Music Review (ibid.), and she recently co-authored a chapter about title sequence music in streaming historical drama series for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Television. Greathouse has presented extensively at various national and international conferences; some highlights include the American Handel Society, the American Musicological Society, the American and International Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Music and the Moving Image, the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. She has served on numerous conference committees and on the boards of the North American British Music Studies Association, the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Haydn Society of North America. Ashley is also a co-founder and core organizer of the annual AMS/SMT After Dark comedy panel and a past President of the Cincinnati Contra Dancers (a local 501(c)(3) nonprofit). She is a soprano and an active instrumental performer on bassoon, clarinet, harp, and piano.